Hillary Brooke

stars  In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), she played the character Jan Peterson, a friend of Doris Day's character. Peterson was Brooke's real birth name.

stars  She will be best remembered perhaps for her incongruous role as Lou Costello's girlfriend (of sorts) on "The Abbott and Costello Show" (1952). With her regal British accent and upper-class, ladylike demeanor, Brooke was treated as a goddess by the comics and was seldom subject to the usual slapstick other actresses on the show were. Even offscreen she was treated the same way by the team. They were notorious for their love of practical jokes, which they often played on cast and crew (and which were often, as could be expected from veteran burlesque comics like them, somewhat risqué). Brooke, however, was never on the receiving end of any of their pranks even though, as she once noted in an interview, she would have loved to have been.

stars  Producers tended to think of her as too intelligent and self-possessed to be sexy, so she never got the lead and seldom got the man. She displayed a real flair for comedy, however, and appeared with Bob Hope (Monsieur Beaucaire (1946)) and Red Skelton (The Fuller Brush Man (1948)) and, of course, was a regular as Lou Costello's semi-girlfriend on "The Abbott and Costello Show" (1952). Some other notable pictures in which she was cast include The Philadelphia Story (1940), Lady in the Dark (1944), Jane Eyre (1944), Ministry of Fear (1944), The Enchanted Cottage (1945) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

stars  Although she spoke with an English accent, she wasn't British; she was actually from Astoria, New York. She said that she cultivated that accent at the beginning of her career in order to set her apart from all the other tall blondes she would be competing with for parts. The tactic worked so well that producers who hired "the blonde with the British accent" expected to hear a blonde with a British accent on the screen, so she was forced to use the accent whenever she worked, and wound up using it all the time, even off screen.

stars  Had two children with second husband: son Donald and stepdaughter Carol